If anything Greece, Portugal, and Ireland could benefit from a right wing government
Ireland had ten years of government (from 1997 to 2007), during which the seeds of the current disaster were sown, where economic policy was disproportionally influenced by a small neoliberal party, and since 2008 has carried out the largest budget adjustment of any Western economy in the last 30 years with none of the positive results on the deficit that the advocates of expansionary fiscal contraction (EFC) expected.
(from
http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2011/03/22/behaving-like-teenagers/)
We were running budget surpluses right up until the crash and had one of the lowest rates of government expenditure as a percentage of GDP in the OECD. Short of a military junta, I don't think we could have moved much further to the right. The main problem here is banking rather than fiscal. Canada in the early 90s, like Ireland in the late 80s, had the advantage of a much larger booming economy next door. The EFC trick doesn't seem to work without one.
Postscript: The last governments that we had that could be described as "left-wing" were the two coalitions involving Labour between 1992 and 1997; the first with the then-considerably larger but economically pragmatic Fianna Fáil, and the second with the rightish but then-not much larger Fine Gael and the much smaller soft-Eurocommunist Democratic Left (since subsumed into Labour - or vice-versa, the current Labour leader having been a DL junior minister at the time). They're generally considered to be the economically-sanest governments of the last 30 years.
